Japanese Are Stereotyped as Quiet Engineers Abroad, Not Career Elites

In America, small talk sometimes happens at the supermarket checkout.

This isn’t just a scene from a TV drama. It’s a fairly common everyday occurrence.

When I first moved to America, I always carried my passport with me. The reason was that clerks asked for ID quite frequently when I bought alcohol, and at the time I didn’t yet have a driver’s license. Showing a passport reveals your nationality. Sometimes people would say, “Oh, you’re Japanese.” After all, people often mistake me for Chinese.

At coffee shops like Starbucks, they often write your name on the cup. This is to prevent order mix-ups. In America, I went by “KUZ.” No matter how you cut up YUICHIRO KUZURYU, it’s hard for locals to pronounce, so I used the least difficult part. As a result, it was often written as “KAZ.” Quite a lot of Japanese people live in Silicon Valley, and “Kaz-something” is a common name among them, and since KAZ is easy for locals to pronounce too, it’s familiar to them as well. I even ran into soccer-loving staff who said “I know Kazuyoshi Miura,” but in any case, this too led to “Oh, KAZ. You’re Japanese, then.”

On these occasions, the line that follows with high probability is, “Huh. So, an engineer?”

People whose business involves a lot of contact with Japanese naturally understand that Japanese people in Silicon Valley hold all kinds of jobs, and they probably have Japanese acquaintances who are pure businesspeople or entrepreneurs too. Anyone who interacted with Japanese exchange students during their school days probably had their perception broadened there as well. But for those without that exposure, I sensed from various other scenes that in many cases a stereotype has taken root: Japanese people are engineers—competent, quiet, and polite. I remember once, when I showed my passport to a young male cashier who seemed unsure how to check my age and was fumbling, a veteran woman doing the bagging said, “She’s Japanese. So it’s fine.”

However, when it comes to career matters, the situation changes completely.

Anyone who believes a Japanese person’s career built in Japan will simply carry over abroad needs to rethink that assumption. This isn’t a matter of Japanese technical skill or anything like that—it’s that most Americans, unless they’re serious Japan enthusiasts, don’t know and aren’t interested in what’s happening in Japan. (Though they do like MANGA.)

They know about big companies like Toyota and Sony. But that’s the same way Japanese people know about big companies like Johnson & Johnson or Cisco—there’s none of the mixture of respect and awe reserved for GAFA. At a large company, the work covers a wide range and projects are large in scale. Without knowing what position someone held and what they contributed there, simply having worked at a big company doesn’t carry much informational weight—especially in America, where labor mobility is high. As for educational background, in Japan only something like the University of Tokyo really registers. Among some intellectual circles or people with some familiarity with Japan, names like Waseda or Keio might come up, but that’s about as far as it goes.

In the end, for most Americans, Japan is just some vague island nation across the Pacific. (Though they do love SUSHI.)

I’ve never lived anywhere other than Silicon Valley, but other places probably have an even lower proportion of Japanese people. So I can imagine things only getting worse, not better.

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Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/10/1106/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.